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Educators increasingly are praising Twitter as a tool to help them connect with each other, as well as access resources and experts in their field, writes Susan Bearden, director of information technology at Holy Trinity Episcopal Academy in Melbourne, Fla. In this commentary, Bearden suggests 13 Twitter chats that every educator should follow, including #edchat, which draws voices worldwide, she writes.

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As educators continue to use Twitter to connect with fellow professionals, a number of valuable Twitter chats have launched, according to this roundup of the top five Twitter chats for educators. Popular chats include #edchat, which occurs twice on Tuesdays, and #lrnchat, which is focused on social media and education.

It is now clear that the federal E-Rate program is going to be reformed, and it is expected the modernized program will be more focused on installing broadband Internet in schools. In addition, a reformed program could cease payments for outdated technology -- such as pagers -- and increase available funding and improve transparency in pricing, experts speculate.

A Tennessee school district's fiber-optic Internet connection operates with about 100 megabytes of data, which the district's high schools sometimes max out. Now, as the district prepares to implement online testing, plans are underway to expand the system's capability to 1 gigabyte -- about 10 times its current size -- and make improvements to its router, officials say.

Officials in a Kansas school district say they increasingly are faced with having to respond to students' activities on social media that have an impact on the school campus. One high school recently suspended a student for comments he made on Twitter. Questions remain, however, over how far schools should go to respond to students' online behavior.

Teachers increasingly are using Twitter for professional development and collaboration, according to this blog post. There are several scheduled educational chats on Twitter in which teachers interested in a certain topic meet online at a specific time. Others are searching for hashtags related to a topic of interest, such as #Edchat, which includes information that would appeal to all educators; #SSchat for social-studies teachers; and #Engchat for English teachers. This blog post also features an interview with the founders of those Twitter streams, who talk about the power of the medium.